


Sleeping Arrangements

by roseveare



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 20:57:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7284448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseveare/pseuds/roseveare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Doctor," Nyssa said, steeling her jaw in advance because she had the feeling he wasn't going to take this seriously. "Tegan has a problem."</p><p>In which the TARDIS eats Tegan's bedroom, and replaces it with something bizarre instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Arrangements

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merryghoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryghoul/gifts).



> Prompt was for matchmaking and something based on [this meta](http://circular-time.tumblr.com/post/86877924729/in-which-the-nyssategan-shippers-are-incredibly), though it's only vaguely a fit to the meta. 
> 
> I've not heard more than a few of the audios, so this is TV-show canon only.

"Doctor," Nyssa said, steeling her jaw in advance because she had the feeling he wasn't going to take this seriously. "Tegan has a problem."

"Problem!" her outspoken friend echoed, making her disgust apparent with her tone of voice, and Nyssa wriggled her foot out of her shoe to poke Tegan hard in the back of the shin while continuing to meet the Doctor's eyes very, very seriously. _You promised me you would leave the talking to me_ , she thought. _Since you railled at him yesterday after the Ifrezons made us spend six hours in decontamination to visit their 'splendid tourist planet!', and it wasn't_ his _fault, not really. And we both agreed that you really didn't want to make a habit of it_. She thought the words intently, as if she could project them from her mind to Tegan's. Her friend fell back into silence, so she had evidently received the message one way or another.

The Doctor's face fell with almost comical dismay. Nyssa wasn't convinced he was unaware of the rest, even if his eyes hadn't so much as flickered down. "A problem, Nyssa? Tegan? What's the matter, eh?"

"Well. The TARDIS seems to have--"

"The TARDIS ate my bedroom!" Tegan blurted, and shook her head at Nyssa's accusing look.

"I beg your pardon?" The Doctor clutched at his hat with shocked sincerity.

"Tegan's bedroom is gone, Doctor," Nyssa said, smoothly, patiently.

"--and you should see what's there in its place!" 

"It is quite peculiar," Nyssa agreed. "I'm not sure if -- it may even be _dangerous_." She allowed a little more concern to enter her voice, but the TARDIS was a massively advanced, old, intricate and frequently eccentric alien vessel which seemed to have its own consciousness, of sorts, and she didn't want to appear alarmist. "It's not something I've ever seen in the TARDIS before. Perhaps some sort of incursion..."

The Doctor's forehead developed puzzled lines. "You'd both better show me, hadn't you?"

Nyssa tried to slip her foot back into her shoe covertly as they were hustled around by his hands on their shoulders, and almost tripped. Tegan caught her around the waist with a laugh and a high, false, "Whoops! Clumsy you." She wasn't sure if she was being mocked, but at least Tegan _caught_ her.

***

"Oh, now, would you look at this," the Doctor mused with a gentle charm as he stood in the doorway of what had been Tegan's room, hat scrunched between his hands. "They were quite the fashion on Gallifrey at the time I left -- left the first time, that is, which is so long ago now that they may even be _back_ in fashion. You never know."

"It isn't an incursion?" Nyssa asked, with some relief.

"It _isn't_ a big hole into space that's eaten up my room?" Tegan asked. "All my things!"

"Oh, no, no. It's... well, we called them star chambers. This is one of the _tackier kind_ \--" He lowered his voice significantly to barely a whisper, as if afraid he'd offend his craft. "I can only imagine it's here because... well, we all know the TARDIS likes to do a little bit of redecorating every now and then. They're _her_ rooms after all, the old thing. And it's a... valid enough bedroom design choice... or it was, for a -- I think hopefully quite a very _short_ time -- back on Gallifrey."

"It's _space_ ," Tegan said, indignantly. "Space where my room should be. Doctor! I'd bought clothes!"

"It's perfectly safe," the Doctor said vaguely, wisely hedging around the issue of the clothes. He diverted attention by stepping blithely out onto it. Nyssa and Tegan both gasped as his feet struck nothing and stuck there, letting him push out into... into the _depths_ of the room. Inside, there were no walls, was no floor, no ceiling. Only a voidlike blackness peppered by the pinprick lightpoints of stars. Nyssa could recognise groupings, constellations, squint and pick out nebulae, stars of different spectrum. "It's like... like space in a bottle!" the Doctor shouted back excitably. "Perfectly safe!" He bounced a little on his toes, floated up and down on nothing.

Tegan gulped and extended a foot to cautiously tap her heel on the nothing inside the room.

"That's not a real explanation!" Nyssa called forward to the Doctor, a little offended to be offered vague science.

"No, but... it's much more romantic than if I'd said, 'it's simultaneously allowing a customised zero-gravity breathable air environment and the entire void of the universe to occupy the same small space at the same time'. It's like working with mirrors. And like I said... _perfectly safe_!" The Doctor kicked back and lay on nothing but darkness and distant stars with his hands clasped behind his head. "Amazing what you can do with a few quantum singularities and the right mathematics."

"If I step out onto this, am I going to die horribly?" Tegan asked -- of Nyssa -- pointedly. "I mean, will it work for a human being the same way it works for him?" She pointed at the Doctor almost accusingly.

"I think we're alright..."

Tegan's single foot was still hovering, but Nyssa stepped out first, tentatively surrendering all of her weight to the cradle of... bottled space. Tegan grabbed the back of her blouse and stepped after her, pinwheeling a bit with her free arm.

"...Well," Tegan said after a moment, as they clung to each other and wide-eyed resisted freaking out at the void reeling down under their toes. "This is different."

The Doctor swam past them, showing off his breast-stroke.

***

The star chamber provided a diverting few hours of play, but it was a diverting few hours that didn't bring Tegan's room back or bring them any closer to recovering it.

"...And I'm not sleeping in here, you know," Tegan said, turning a circle on the air, head over toes. She was becoming quite adept at the zero gravity, although it was just as well the outfit she'd been left with included her shorts and not a skirt. Although Nyssa winced a little at the thought she might prefer her skirt around her ears than to be stuck in that old outfit again for any length of time. "What if the TARDIS decided to put things back the way they were before and I was floating too far from the floor? Or _under_ the floor? Or if _I_ got misplaced the same way as _all my new clothes_?"

"We can go back to Velta and do the shopping again," the Doctor said, with a long suffering sigh, to both Nyssa and Tegan's yips of delight. Well, with that offer he would certainly engineer himself forgiven -- by proxy, for what was _really_ the TARDIS's crime. He'd also made a highly amusing clothes-horse, following them around all day strewn with their ever expanding bags and packages. Nyssa suppressed a giggle at the thought of a redux.

"It's almost bedtime," Tegan pointed out. "Or, or, I know, we're on TARDIS time now, which is no sort of time at all. But _I'm_ tired. I don't know what time it would be back in London, or Amsterdam."

"It's okay," Nyssa said, offering a smile. "You can come in and share with me again." She looked down shyly and tried to suppress her smile as she watched for Tegan's reaction through her eyelashes.

Tegan opened her mouth, shot a sidelong glance to the Doctor, then closed it again. "Well," she said, brighter, albeit with noticeably false casualness. "All girls together, right?"

***

"I'm sure he knows," Nyssa mumbled, later, her fingers trying not to curl too tightly in Tegan's hair as it tickled, down against her belly. It was shorter than it had been, and straighter now, the ends a little crisp and spikey with whatever product Tegan had used that morning. "I don't know why you pretend he doesn't know."

She made a little noise and tried not to squirm. Tegan raised her head with a grin, lips slightly swollen.

"You don't have to _stop_ ," Nyssa objected.

"The TARDIS knows," Tegan said, having at least enough mercy to replace her absent mouth with her fingers, teasing slowly with the pad of her thumb. "A bit too _convenient_ that it managed to replace my room with a bunch of... of _space_."

Nyssa squeaked and sniggered, the two sounds pretty much wanting to be simultaneous. "Oh, Tegan, you can't think the TARDIS is _setting us up_ ," she said breathlessly. 

"You're the one who calls it 'sentient'," her friend... _lover_ , she amended it back to, at least inside her head... retorted.

"Only because the Doctor speaks about it so-- and not sentient like _that_. Not down to comprehending dating interactions among sentient species, let alone interspecies dating interactions, let alone non-conventional couplings between same sex--"

Tegan slid back down, where her words huffed warm air against Nyssa's skin. "Seriously, I don't know why we didn't just sleep in the same room again from the start."

"Well, there are so many, and so much has happened..." Nyssa meandered, an admittedly vague murmur, as she touched on things about which she didn't really want to speak.

"We're still us, though," Tegan said. "The TARDIS was right. Hesitating was a load of nonsense."

"Well, now we're back," Nyssa whispered happily. "Whether it's coincidence or not. Do you mind if we turn off the light? Although... it does mean one of us is going to have to get up to do it..." She sighed.

The lights faded slowly out and nestled them in an embracing darkness. Both their indrawn breaths sounded all the sharper for the lack of illumination.

"'Coincidence'?" Tegan hissed.

"Stop _spying_ on us!" Nyssa squeaked indignantly, scrambling under the blankets, then realising the futility of that given how many other means to sense that the TARDIS must have that weren't reliant on a direct visual, _then_ feeling all the more indignant as she realised she was yelling at a spacecraft.

"Great. Our TARDIS is a pervert. Still, the lights are off," Tegan said, squirming and trying to get her head back down to business. "If I was going to worry about the TARDIS watching whatever we're doing inside it, I'd never dare to go to the bathroom again... Will you _stay still_?"

Nyssa swallowed and gave in, a fraction crossly. "Of course. It _can't_ be more than scientific interest to a Time and Relative Dimensions in Space vessel, anyway."

It simply didn't make sense to entertain, for a single moment, that it had engineered this _on purpose_.

END


End file.
